This week’s Twitter Mailbag has a little bit of everything, from a look at the main event of next week’s UFC Fight Night 29, to the viral video showdown between Chael Sonnen and Wanderlei Silva, to questions about Bellator’s relative “value,” as determined by the UFC president.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a week in MMA if there wasn’t some new TRT-related saga to knock around, now would it?

Ask a question of your own by tweeting it to @BenFowlkesMMA. Or just enjoy the fruits of other people’s Twitter labors, if that’s more your style.

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@benfowlkesMMA The Sonnen/Silva confrontation fascinates me, for some reason. What are your thoughts on the matter? #tmb

Mostly I think that Wanderlei Silva does not realize how he comes off during stunts like this one. Judging by his video blog, he seems to think there’s nothing quite so badass as sandwiching a staged confrontation between threatening monologues laid over screeching guitars. I respectfully disagree. Chael Sonnen didn’t look the least bit frightened during their recent faceoff. Silva just looked like a guy who will bring his own camera to a poorly planned publicity stunt. Some people complain (and not for no reason) that Sonnen’s antics make our legitimate sport look too much like a pro wrestling knockoff. If that’s true, Silva’s antics make it look like a pro wrestling knockoff produced by a middle school AV club. Veteran fighters in their 30s can do (and should know) better.

@benfowlkesMMA does anyone really care about Maia vs Shields? What was the UFC thinking?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m pretty excited about seeing Demian Maia and Jake Shields go at it, and not just because I’m planning to watch that fight in my gi while yelling “Jiu-jitsu!” at the top of my lungs (apologies in advance to my neighbors). Yes, this is the kind of fight that could be absolutely terrible. We could see one long stalemate as two ground specialists nullify each other in a brilliant display of tactical nothingness. But honestly, I’d rather see the UFC take a chance on that than shoot for lopsided match-ups between sloppy brawlers.

Maia seems to have rediscovered his roots as a ground specialist at welterweight, while Shields is still trying to prove that somewhere in his frustrating skill-set lies a genuine offense just waiting to be unleashed. So yeah, let’s throw them together and see who can make something happen. I’m into that. If you’re not, that’s cool. But then you don’t also get to complain about Yushin Okami getting cut after six years of doing exactly the kind of thing you don’t care to watch here.

@benfowlkesMMA speaking of sponsor banners, why do fighters feel the need to emblazon them with a photo of themselves? Seems…I dunno, vain

First of all, let’s not make the mistake of assuming that fighters are overly involved with the creation of their own sponsor banners. Most of them give little thought to what’s on there as long as it helps get them paid. That’s why they have managers, whose job it is to worry about that kind of stuff. Some managers do it better than others. A few of the people I talked to for my story on the origin of sponsor banners said that Brian Butler-Au of Sucker Punch Entertainment consistently produced the best sponsor banners, which he attributed to his background in marketing and design.

“I noticed everyone was just plopping logos down on a black banner as a value add for the sponsors,” Butler-Au said. “I knew that with a design background, I could do better. I wanted it to be more like a collage or a work of art behind them.”

One possible reason you see some fighters with their own photos on their banners – which I agree looks weird, unless it’s an awesome comic book-style illustration like the one Josh Barnett had in his last fight – is because, according to Butler-Au, many fighters give the banners to sponsors or hang them in gyms when they’re done with them. If it’s just a collection of logos, it’s less clear who those logos were for once he’s no longer standing in front of it.

Also, according to Butler-Au, there is a right way and a wrong way to transport those sponsor banners, and it’s something he tries to drill into the heads of the coaches and trainers who wind up being responsible for that pricey poster on fight night.

“When they roll it sideways and have to fumble it across, I don’t like that,” Butler-Au said. “When they fold it there are creases. I tell them to roll it up long-ways, so it’s basically a 72-inch long roll. Then all they have to do is hold it up next to the cage and let it unfurl.”

Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference.

@benfowlkesMMA DW said 13 events in Brazil next year. Chuck in North America does Europe and the ROW stand a chance of getting many at all?

Judging by your Twitter handle, I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s one part of the ROW that you’re particularly concerned about, and I think you may be right to worry. The UFC’s love affair with Brazil sounds like it’s about to get serious. Between that and the dueling injury concerns for Michael Bisping and Conor McGregor, let’s just say I wouldn’t cancel any vacation plans to make room in your calendar for that huge UK stadium show any time soon.

But beyond what this might mean for your part of the world, the UFC’s commitment to Brazil doesn’t seem like the best news for fight fans in general. That’s because, at least so far, fight cards down there have followed a predictable pattern: an undercard littered with fighters most fans outside of Brazil either don’t know or don’t care about, with a main or co-main event that features the best fighters of Brazil against the best available fighters of the ROW. That’s great news for Brazilian fighters. They tend to do pretty well on their home soil, so much so that a lot of foreign fighters don’t want to go down there anymore. But is it good for fans, even the Brazilian ones, many of whom are glad to see an increase in events, but also want to see the biggest and best fights rather than Brazil vs. The World every single time? I’m not so sure.

By virtue of Anthony Pettis being the reigning UFC lightweight champ, the Pettis brothers have a good shot at being the most successful sibling duo of the modern era as long as little brother Sergio can do anything at all. And, the way it looks right now, he probably can. The younger Pettis is clearly a talented fighter, and he’d be coming into a relatively thin bantamweight division, where all it takes is a few solid wins to land a fighter in the title picture. Just imagine if the Pettis family had one UFC champ at the same time that it had even one viable UFC title contender. Surely that would put Team Pettis ahead of the Diaz brothers, the Lauzon clan, and even the rapidly aging Nogueira twins. Unless one of Jon Jones‘ brothers gets sick of being successful in the NFL, the Pettis family might have this locked up.

According to UFC President Dana White, Zuffa bought the WFA just to get Quinton Jackson‘s contract rights. So, by White’s own logic, if an organization has even one fighter that the UFC wants, it has some value – at least enough to make purchasing it seem worthwhile, if the price is right. Bellator has Eddie Alvarez, who the UFC clearly wanted, as well as Michael Chandler, who the UFC would almost certainly love to have. I’m not saying it would be a smart business decision to buy Bellator just to get those two, but I don’t see how anyone can say that an organization of Bellator’s size and reach has no value, while the mighty WFA was worth cutting a check for.

@benfowlkesMMA Is anything about Lavar Johnson‘s doctor assuring him that his TRT wouldn’t be measurable either a) ethical or b) believable?

You’re the physician here, Dr. Nerd, so I’ll leave the ethics question to you. I’ll just say that if it turned out that Lavar Johnson had the kind of doctor who wasn’t afraid to help him try and work around MMA’s rules on performance-enhancing drugs, well, he wouldn’t be the only one. Mostly I’m annoyed at Johnson’s attempt to frame his failed drug test as a legitimate medical treatment with some missing paperwork involved. As he told Ariel Helwani, “What happened was basically I was on TRT [testosterone-replacement therapy], I just didn’t disclose it to the athletic commission.” Yeah, that’s called cheating, dude. Call it what it is.

At the same time, let’s not act like we can’t fathom how a fighter might somehow arrive at the totally wrong, totally self-serving conclusion that TRT is not steroids and therefore is not cheating, but rather a simple medical treatment that you just have to be sure to tell the athletic commission about. That’s wrong, of course. Synthetic testosterone is a steroid. Even if you’re doing “such little amounts,” as Johnson claimed he was, you’re still cheating. It’s not just a matter of disclosing it to the athletic commission, either. It’s a matter of getting permission beforehand. Maybe fighters have looked at the TRT trend and now assume that getting the green light is just a formality, or maybe they’re just hearing what they want to hear from shady doctors at “anti-aging clinics.”

The point is, this sport has allowed a handful of fighters to twist perceptions and pervert the spirt of anti-doping measures to the point where a guy can go on an internet radio show and argue, with a straight face, that he’s not a cheater because he was only doing a little bit of steroids, and only the kind a bunch of other guys are on, and anyway his doctor said he wouldn’t get caught. Look at the doping environment we’ve created thanks to TRT. Are we happy with that?

@benfowlkesMMA would you rather have Ronda yanking on your arm, Jon wrenching your neck or Palhares tearing off your leg? #Tmb

Given those unappealing options, I’d most like (or least hate) to experience Ronda Rousey‘s armbar. I have two reasons: 1) I want to see for myself if it’s really so vicious and so immune to the usual defenses and escapes, and 2) unlike Rousimar Palhares, I have faith that Rousey will let go when I tap.

@benfowlkesMMA u think the hate on Twitter can some how be a positive for the sport?Fans are passionate.texansQB is getting mauled down here

I get the point you’re driving at, Joe Daddy, but a passionate jerk is still a jerk. If I stood outside your place of business every day shouting about what an irredeemable loser you were, I doubt you’d find yourself looking through the blinds and thinking, Man, I really respect that guy’s passion. The difference is, in that situation you could come outside and confront me. You could ask me to explain my position, while also forcing me to confront the fact that we are both human beings who deserve a certain amount of respect and dignity, and in the end maybe looking into your eyes and realizing that would shame me into going home and doing something decent with my life.

That doesn’t happen on the Internet. That’s the piece that’s missing when we’re all just a series of avatar photos and @somethings hiding away in our own little bunkers of solitude. Except fighters (and, for that matter, managers and media members and broadcasters and trainers, etc.) are on there as real people, using their real names. They know that what they write on Twitter can impact their real lives. That’s not the case for someone who signs up with a fake name and is there expressly to spew vitriol in an attempt to make other people feel bad about themselves. That guy faces no real consequences for being terrible. If he has any sense, he probably doesn’t tell the people he knows in real life that this is a hobby of his, because he knows his friends and relatives and employers (if they have any sense) would look down on him for it. What’s he going to do, go on a first date and tell the other person, “Yeah, so mainly what I do with my free time is talk crap anonymously to well-known people on the Internet”? My guess is there’d be no second date after that.

So, what? Are we supposed to feel better about fake people doing their best to cause real anguish all because they’re passionate, feeding on one another’s consequence-free, knee-jerk anger? Because really that just makes me feel sad. If you have all that “passion,” and that’s what you’re doing with it, might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie.com and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.com.

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